Imitations
by GoddessofSnark
Summary: It's art imitating life. Or life imitating art. But whatever it is, it's raw, it's real.


A/N-The Garret in my head can be very very annoying sometimes. As in, I will start reading or watching something and he'll decide he likes it and will not let go of me until I write it. Just keep nagging and refuse to let me write anything else, because all he wants to do is something like this-most of the time it involves some various act of destruction or debauchery (The Garret in my head has a very nasty side to him that he apparently doesn't let the office know about...) Well anyway, you pit that with reading Fight Club and Garret wound up with my brain in a half-nelson refusing to let me write anything until I wrote this. I'm not liking the Garret in my head at the moment because I didn't want to write this, mostly because as much as I love Chuck Palahniuk, one fic with a character from his is enough...and I'm writing another one that features St. Anthony's from Choke in it (although no Victor, no Paige, just another thing where Garret was reading with me and decided he wanted to go off on a rant about his mother...)Anyway, I don't own this...just a little fic for fun. Enjoy.

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The metallic taste of the blood drips down my throat, but I ignore it. You can swallow a whole pint of blood before you start getting sick, the little trickle that's going down isn't going to do much. I ignore it, focusing instead on not winding up on the concrete floor beneath me. If you had asked me a month ago if I would even consider being here, I would have laughed in your face. If you had told me I would, I would have had you committed. I thought this was the stuff of a movie, that it was pure fiction. But even fiction has its base in reality. It's art imitating life. Or life imitating art. It's somewhere in between. The book, the movie, it's revered as almost gospel among the other men here. But this is something more than being obsessed with a work of fiction. This is about something that's raw, something that's real.

It's always a little disturbing to see the ones who take their obsession with things a little too far though. There are those who have the bright white scar, the last trace of a burn left with pure lye. Sodium Hydroxide. NaOH. Caustic soda. In the shape of a pair of lips. They went out of their way to burn themselves through just to show their devotion to the work. There are some that went out of their way to work at the old colony to tour, showing what life was really like in 1692 because they're so obsessed with the author. My own life already mirrors that main character too much; I could barely stomach reading it knowing exactly what Victor went through. Life imitating art, or art imitating life, take your pick. Whatever it was, it was too real for me.

But that's why I'm here. It's real. There is nothing more real than feeling someone's foot connect hard with your gut, hard enough to break a rib. That's what got me here in the first place. One dead body rolling through the morgue. Bruised and battered. Cause of death was landing hard enough on his collarbone to dislocate it, driving it into his heart. I ruled it an accident after being dragged into here. Dragged, literally. I started doing my impression of Jordan, poking around where I wasn't supposed to, trying to figure out what the hell the guy had been doing and found myself here. And the rest of the crowd ripped my shirt off, pulled my shoes off and shoved me in the center of the ring of them. And when you're faced with something like that, it becomes pure instinct to protect yourself. It wasn't until after I had the other guy in a chokehold that they decided to read the rules, stolen straight out of the book. Or movie, if you prefer. Their way of imitating the art. Or the art imitating the life.

And no one else knows about this, after all, it is the first rule, isn't it? My only thought is to protect my face, the rest of my body, I could care less about. But I just make sure that even if I was to get called in as I step out of the dingy basement, I can still go to work and look presentable. One black eye was enough to make sure that I covered my head every second I was in there. One black eye can be explained. More than one cannot. One that comes back every now and then cannot. There's one guy that wanted to be slammed so hard into the concrete that he would wind up biting through his cheek. He wanted to be true to canon. Life imitating art.

About the only thing that's not, something that could be right there in the movie is that we stop at the word "give", it's harder to say "give", than it is to say "stop." But other than that, it's people who love the movie, people who follow it as if it's a religion, and those of us who are here for release. It's a trade off. I gave up the booze for this. The booze made me forget how weak I was. This made me strong. Weakness doesn't exist anymore, except in other people, that's what the attraction to this is. It's real. It's intense. And it makes you a man, it makes you feel like you're not only part of something, but you're better because you can kick the crap out of someone. It's raw, it's real. And it's the best case of life imitating art. Or maybe he got the idea from us, and its art imitating life.


End file.
